Belgian police have seized a cache of forgeries of a Tintin adventure book depicting the cartoon hero and his dog Snowy on a "sex holiday" in Bangkok.

Undercover police confiscated some 650 copies of a comic book entitled Tintin in Thailand. Three men were taken into custody but later released.

Tintin: Back in the spotlight

The book depicts Herge's boy hero Tintin, generally a model of propriety, engaged in homosexual acts in a bar.

Snowy, a fox terrier, is depicted performing similar acts with a Siamese cat.

Other scenes show reporter Tintin and his friends, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus, on a pub crawl in Bangkok's notorious Pat Pong district.

Sting operation

Belgium's De Morgen newspaper reports that Herge's publishers alerted the police to the forgeries after a man calling himself Bud E Weyser offered distributors a "previously unknown Tintin book".

Brussels police then organised a sting in which an officer posed as a prospective buyer for the comic books.

The transaction and subsequent arrests took place in the Belgian town of Doornik last week.

The police then caught up with the alleged designer of the forgeries in the northern city of Antwerp.

The forgeries, which were printed in Thailand for distribution in Belgium, are believed to have been in circulation since December 1999 at a cost of between 1,000 and 1,300 Belgian francs each (£15-20).

But, in a final irony, the police have found that the forgeries themselves were copied in Thailand, where thousands of copies in both French and English are in circulation.